I have to say, I don't think I expected to get a tenth of the interest the demo drummed up. It's been a month since release and wishlists have gone from ~125 to 1900, a genuinely massive gain. Not only that, but I've received feedback from over 20 different people across various platforms - I expected to hear from 5 at most. There's a long way to go, but this is a much stronger start than I could've ever hoped for. To everyone who's played the demo, wishlisted the game, or shared it around - thank you!
Now, for business.
The reception to the demo was more positive than I expected, but there's still a lot of issues. The three areas that have been most consistently criticized are UI/UX, Tutorial, and Pacing. My hope is to ship an updated demo sometime next year which addresses all of these, and adds just a teensy bit of new content. To summarize how I plan to approach each issue:
UI/UX are going to be redone from the ground up, both artistically and functionally. This is a pretty massive endeavor that will take place (parallel to other development) over the next several months.
The tutorial is currently in a "rethink how to approach it" stage. I've gotten a lot of feedback about the initial text blocks being pretty extreme and I want to make them more digestible. A "smooth tutorial" that doesn't as heavily interrupt gameplay is being considered, but I'm not sure how to make it work yet. I'll share more progress on this front in the future.
Right now, the pacing of the game (especially the early sections) is very rough. I have some serious polish planned for the intro sequence as a whole (which I'll hopefully share more about soon). The slow pace of battle (i.e. long periods of time where the player has no input) has been a frequent issue, and is also something I plan to address - probably with speed settings, or a speed-up button.
There are several other areas which need polish, and will be addressed over time. Camera movement, resolution scaling behavior, improved settings, combat log, etc.
Additionally, there's some heavy maintenance, and some new features, that I need to complete. I'm currently knee-deep in the maintenance side of things, but want to share some of the features I'll soon be working on:
The Map Editor is something I'm very excited to get started on. My current version is very simplistic, and won't support the level of detail I intend to have in future content. In order to do some of the things I want to do, I need an extremely robust map creator tool. This is my next priority after maintenance, and is something I intend to make publicly available once the game releases. I'll be sharing updates on this as I go, and I think people will find some of them to be very interesting.
Fate Points are a mechanic I've had in mind for a while, and the last thing "missing" from the core gameplay sandbox. These are a resource that is gained by failing (i.e. missing attacks, rolling nat 1's, etc.) which can be used to tilt the odds in your favor. Exact details of this system are still being figured out, but the intent is to make bad luck feel "less bad" than it currently does.
The Sixth Character is also being worked on. She's still in the design phase, and doesn't even have concept art yet, but will hopefully be showing up soon. I won't share details for now, but know that this is the last character planned for the party. 6 (Caithe, Aesa, Samwell, Meiku, Rom, and A????a) will be the full roster for the game.
Finally, there's the matter of timelines. My hope is that, once all of the remaining "foundation" work is done, I will be able to shift into a mix of content development and visual polish. I have tried to frontload as much work as possible for this game, with the aim of accelerating content development later on. "Later on" is nearly here.
My goal, regardless of when the updated Demo releases, is to have 7 full chapters of Fractal Odyssey "complete" by the end of next year. That means game design, programming, music, and writing done for each of those 7. Visuals (specifically sprites) and voice will likely be lagging behind - they are mostly done through commissioned artists at the moment, and those cost money.
In order to hold myself accountable to this, and to help build more interest in the project, I'm going to start sharing a lot more about the game through social media in the coming year. The coming year of development is where I get to break out of "building the basics" and get to work on the cool stuff, so I think there will be plenty to share.
If you've read this far, thank you. Fractal Odyssey is a project I care deeply about, and I can't wait for the world to see it.